


Shift Change

by alephthirteen



Category: Original Work
Genre: Elves!, F/F, Hollywood, Intrigue, Lesbians!, M/M, Murder, NaNoWriMo 2020, US Senators, Vampires!, gays!, shifters!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:54:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27333745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: Pip is a half-elf assassin who was cross-bred like a labradoodle, mixing this monster and that to tune her body for tracking, fighting, and killing.Viv is a vampire with a library of kinks.Shae just got over a breakup and she's sick of her kid brother teasing her about being better at picking up boys than she is at picking up girls.  She's not going to say no to some fun with two ladies who know how to adult.  Especially not after she meets Pip's rescue kittens and see's Viv's drool-worthy home workshop.When they wake up with identical knives jammed into their skin, someone has some explaining to do and no one remembers who that is.  That's when bodies start falling.  Human bodies.  The guy who sold the gyros at their date on the boardwalk.  The journalist who's been pestering Viv.  As a politician proposes walled neighborhoods and separate cities, a murderer stalks San Diego, killing people linked to the triad.  Sooner or later the cops will decide to throw caution to the wind and go after Pip and she'll have to choose whether to flee or submit and risk everything.  Choose between the woman she's spent millennia with and the human life she built for herself which she loves more than she can admit.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 5
Kudos: 5





	1. Pip I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Types of vampire:  
>  _moroi_ \- warm-blooded, breathing and heartbeat. Fragile but quick-healing and gifted with magic.  
>  _strigoi_ \- cold blooded, "dead" bodies. Incredibly durable, fast and strong but slow to heal.
> 
> Types of elf:  
>  _aqua sidhe_ water elf  
>  _ferox sidhe_ wild-elf  
>  _igni sidhe_ fire elf  
>  _glacies sidhe_ ice elf  
>  _solaris sidhe_ sun elf  
>  _stellis sidhe_ star-elf or night-elf  
>  _scleratis sidhe_ stone-elf (artificial cross breed)

“Hey, Pip!”

Maddy slides through a gap in her school’s wrought-iron fence with a weird mix of grace and clumsiness. She’s perfectly teenage in how she can do new tricks with her longer, leaner body but isn’t sure how to do them on purpose.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Nana send you to pick me up?”

“Well, I’m not here to hunt orcs or make Christmas presents…”

The school bus driver shoots them a warning look. Pip claps her hand on Maddy’s shoulder and fishes her allowed-visitor lanyard out. His lips stay tight and his jaw set, but his shoulders relax and he loses the fight brewing in his posture.

Still. Worth watching him in the mirrors of the parked cars. As they head east, towards the highway and the beach, she learns about him in flickers and glimpses. Two dads, both moroi, pick up a squealing girl with bright pink eyeshadow and fangs too big for her mouth. 

The bus driver’s hands clench into fists. 

A tall woman, solaris sidhe by the look of it, swans past in a black bikini and a wrap, her sun-kissed skin rising in shade from its natural blonde as more and more sun hits it, thickening her own magic. By the time she reaches the teachers distributing the children to their families, one woman has popped on sunglasses to shield her eyes from the glare of lemony-bright energy that drenches the leaves of the hedges. She gathers her squirmy, handsome son into her arms and kisses his head as he whines. A human girl older than him blows a bubble and flicks the tip of his long ear with her fake nails, jumping back when the mother levels a stare at her. The mom’s eyes have sublimated from flesh to raw energy. Anything could happen to that girl. Literally. A sun-elf in always bright Southern California can draw on enough magic to bring down a city block in a heartbeat. Just before he climbs into the Lexus, the boy’s father gives him a hug too, nudges him and nods at the girl teasing him. He kid sort of shrinks, rubbing his reddish curls with big, pink-palmed hands from his dark-skinned dad where it sticks to caramel skin from his mom. The father laughs and claps his son’s shoulder.

The bus driver doesn’t react to the elves. Meaning he’s more dangerous than she realized. Pip had assumed he was anti-magical but this smacks of something worse. Racists don’t study up. With the current human supremacy crowd being raised in clenched mega-churches and sister-marrying mountain compounds, they’re not big on studying magic or defense against it.

Somehow this one is smart enough to know that a moroi _can_ drain him in midday and _would_ if he went after their kid but it’s a challenge for any vamp to be in so much sun for any reason. He’s aware that the sun-elf momma bear _will_ turn him into bubbling fat and melted shoes if he pushes her into a corner and knows that in these conditions, she wouldn’t even muss her updo.

He picked his battles.

Pip slides her phone out of her pocket and tilts it his way before mashing the remote shutter in her other palm a dozen times. If there’s a hunter hanging around an all-races middle school, that’s something the Seeker’7s Guild needs to be aware of.

“What did you learn in history today?” Pip asks.

Maddy’s the closest she’s ever come to having kids, and she’s not going to spoil it for herself by staying in a fighting frame of mind.

“Whew…” Maddy mumbles, smashing another stick of green apple gum into her mouth.

“The Black phone was last week,” Pip reminds her.

“Right! So, we did the velvet invasion today. Also a piece about…about what happened on 9/11 in New York.”

_About the time I failed Tys._

Pip sighs.

“You can say her name.”

“About Tys and Kya. It’s…”

“It’s not my fault,” Pip sighs. “In my head, I know that. They sent me out for coffee. Why not? Not like Tys needed her the first of her guard just to chase her fiancee into the supply closet fo-“

She looks at her twelve-year-old friend. Maddy rolls her eyes.

“A nice game of monopoly, I’m sure,” Maddy teases. “Pip, you couldn’t have done anything. Not against…”

“That’s just it, kid. I _could_ have. I _had_ done that before. The first is picked for being a friend, like I was to Tys. But if an army attacks, the first needs to be able fight their way back to the rest of the honor guard. Has to be worth as much as the other hundred and ten. Once, this bishop sent his followers after us. Small army of swordsmen came at us, backed by archers. She had the magic, I had the instincts. We had to make a break for it and the only way was _through_ a wall of swords and fire.”

“Like a collapsing building,” Maddy realizes.

“Exactly. She deflected and kept her shields up, I cut down anything that made it past, helped her find where to jump and where to step.”

This time, it’s Pip who stares down at her stalled feet. Maddy squeezes her hand.

“Hey. You did what your queen wanted. The book talks about the elves helping. The _kaqe rimsoak_ helped more than a dozen folks get out of the south tower.” (queen’s spirit)

 _“Kaqe urveup,”_ Pip reminds Maddy. “ _Rimsoak_ is spirit. _Urveup_ is guard. There’s lots of queen’s gaurd but each queen only gets one Spirit.”

Maddy squeezes Pip’s hand.

“Come on. Ice cream at home.”

At the corner of the block is a short, thick-bodied kid sits on the curb. His charcoal black skin shot with raspberry-pink splotches isn’t sweaty despite the merciless sun beating down. He’s about Maddy’s age. The moment he sees them, fifty feet before he might have to do anything about it, he ducks his head rather than meet Maddy’s eyes and his tiny, still-wet horns peek through his messy haircut. Four little baby-goat horns, made of glass the color of dark cherries. 

His baggy, too-warm-for-summer clothes hide his wings and tail well enough until something embarrasses him and then his coat and his sweatpants wriggle. Few of the glassfolk try to pass. The girl who plops down on the curb beside him sure isn’t. She hands over a second sweaty slurpee to him and he takes it. She must have ducked into the 7-11 to shed her school clothes. Now she’s in a hot pink crop top and acid-washed short shorts, and the careful rips in both top and bottom let her wings and tail out to play. She’s doing everything she can to show off her skin. Dark as ink and glossy as a grand piano.

Pip didn’t know glassfolk in this city came in flavors like _shyness_ until just now.

Maddy locks up. The hand Pip’s holding gets sweaty and the poor girl trips on her own feet. Pip can’t help but remember herself half-grown ages back. Shaking, sweating, panicky and gripping the dagger in her hands too tight to make a proper jab. The trainers spent more herbs healing her than any other acolyte.

At least for Maddy, the cause of panic is puppy love, not close-quarters knife fights.

The girl looks up and Maddy squeaks. The boy shuffles and the girl’s eyes _stay_ on Maddy and soon she’s breathing faster, shallower. Her fingernails pluck at an imaginary bit of grime on her knee and she bits her lip.

A mirrored pair, Pip realizes. Two bodies, one mind, trying to split their attraction to Maddy between them and mask their overcharged hormones. Failing. He’s not covering his lap to hide anything, but that’s only because his other half is about to soak the denim and slide right off the curb. 

“Call me?” Maddy pleads. “I know you’re grounded, but we can watch Netflix while we talk.”

“Sure,” the boy mumbles.

The girl just nods.

Pip lets them get some distance between them before she asks.

“What are their names?”

“Not sure. Click and Clank is what they go by at school. Something about his Halloween costume they did a couple years ago, I think.”

“Maddy. Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?” she hisses.

“‘Course. It’s 2020, Pip. There’s a chapter on safe sex with demons in Sex Ed, I think it was thr-“

Maddy groans.

“Glassfolk, sorry.”

“Attagirl.”

“It’s kinda cool. How shiny they are. I mean, sure. Wings and horns. But I’m surprised that anyone would rather call them demons.”

“Old habits die hard,” Pip reminds her. “Especially when it’s useful for someone in power to keep them going.”

Maddy gives her a shove.

“Conspiracy theorist.”

“Rookie,” Pip teases.

“ _Encyclopaedia Magica_. Nerd.”

“Whelp,” Pip shoots back. “Scrawny little hoo-man.”

Maddy snorts.

“Yeah, I’m terrified of the elf with cat ears on her helmet.”

Maddy deflates when their walk takes them past the motorcycle space at the edge of the bowling alley’s parking lot. She stops walking, whipping her head around.

“Wait. No bike? We walking home?”

“Yeah.”

“Boo!”

“Yeah, well, your grandma would kill me if I showed up on the bike.”

Maddy cocks her head and looks over at pip.

“Aren’t you some centuries-old badass? Swords? Fireballs? Teeth? Claws?”

Pip shrugs.

“How do you think I got this old? I didn’t piss off any _abuelitas_ , that’s how. _“_

Maddy hums.

“That makes sense. Nana’s scary. Come on! Race ya.”

“Don’t ru-“

It’s too late. Maddy is off at a sprint.

“...run off.”

Pip closes her eyes and draws in a full breath. The kid’s fast but she’s not an elf. Maddy will be doubled over and panting when Pip catches up to the end of the trail. 

Scent first, her trainer always said.

There’s a taco truck nearby and carne asada is the special today. No question that the tortillas are handmade. 

The parking lot reeks of like hot tar and leaking gasoline. 

Vanilla soap, second-hand teenage boy stink and the chemical tang of artificial apple flavor.

Pip opens her eyes again and turns her head, scenting the wind. The highway is upwind, but there’s no way that Maddy is hiding in that roaring river of steel moving at fifty miles an hour. She spots Maddy’s empty windbreaker dancing in the air currents above the cars, tossed and blown around until it snags on a hot-rods grill and goes under the wheels. A scattering of shiny shards scatters along the asphalt. The carcass of her cell phone.

“ _Iiblar_ “ (shit)

Maddy knows this neighborhood can be dangerous. She’s not ‘go downwind’ stupid, not ‘play in traffic’ stupid. She sure as fuck isn’t stupid enough to ditch Pip _and_ leave an article of clothing fragrant enough to track her.

Pip feels a surge of warmth against her left hip. She unzips her jacket and feels for the cause. It’s not her blades, still and cold in their sheaths. It’s not the tri-metal braid of delicate chains, hanging limp around her waist like a belt that goes around four times. It’s not the crystal rod Viv gave her who knows how long ago to practice her spellcraft.

It’s the bottle from her handler. The sheer heat means that whatever the new contract is, it’s supposed to get done right the fuck now. She uncorks it and dumps the oil-soaked paper into her hand.

She pops the parchment in her mouth, chews, and swigs from the flask she keeps in her pocket. 

_At least they started flavoring it._

It doesn’t take long for the extracted memories to fill her mind.

**_Laughter. Naked bodies. A beefy frame. Pushing down into the sheets. Fullness. Hardness. Warmth. Screaming. Bloody hands. Skin caught under the fingers. Ice crystals gathering on a glass of champagne. Stuck-open eyes reflecting a gaunt teal face, long ears, and featureless silver eyes._ **

Pip snaps out with a gasp. It can’t be a coincidence that the Guild sent her a job for a deep-elf rapist the same week a huge yachting convention is in town.

She taps out a quick text to Detective Connelly.

[PC: New contract. Water-elf slasher.]

[DetOC: And?]

[PC: Was walking Maddy home. She split when I grabbed it. Keep an eye out.]

[DetOC: 33rd precinct nearby. I’ll send someone.]

[PC: 😎]

[DetOC: Emojis make me feel old, kid.]

Maddy has lived in San Diego since she was a baby, yet the ocean creeps her out. 

Chances she went anywhere near the marina are slim to none.

**\-----**

Pip stretches her claws out. They’re short, but they’re rock hard. Enough to slow her fall as she scrabbles her way up the building. She leaps.

Her sneakers catch easily on the concrete grooves that drain the roof and she goes into a split, bracketing herself between them.

There’s a ladder, but it’s a stretch. Fifteen feet with no surface to jump from. From the ground it would be twenty. No better odds.

She glances around. Junkyard next door with a bundle of rebar just inside the fence. Pip reaches out towards it, closes her eyes, and yanks on reality’s leash. 

There’s iron and rust to work with. There’s oxygen in rust. Oxygen can burn. The slag will drip down, protecting the ground under it before chaos and rot can dig a crater.

Shaping the molten metal into a cable and hook takes longer than she’d hoped, but she had to do it quietly and channel heat and energy without dissolving the wall she’s clinging to. Summoning it over here isn’t an option. The thrust required to pull that much weight would make a crack louder than a heavy rifle, and the kickback would pancake the fence and the beat-up Toyota near the stack.

Pip dismounts the wall and retrieves her new toy. Still hot to the touch. Enough to blister her hands before the regeneration kicks in. About fifty feet of tightly braided wires in a bundle thick as two fingers. Capped with a nasty, five-prong hook with flat-toothed blades and spaded tips.

Worth taking home when it’s done. Maybe even worth putting a few runes on.

She gives it a toss, and it sails easily onto the roof, snagging on the protective cage for the ladder when she draws it back. She summits the roof in seconds, wrapping the cable around her left arm and swinging the hooked end to stave off boredom.

Gravel roof, good sightlines. Hatch into the building below. Perfect.

She flicks the silver-plated telescope out and looks over the area.

The row of mega-yachts ten deep fills most of the pier. Nearest her is a serpentine number. Chrome hull with an upper deck made entirely of glass. Several rooms. A small library worth of books, desks, and a wet bar. A compact, sleek kitchen with brass pans is near the opaque walls of what must be the bedroom and bathroom. Star elves. Nerdy ones, judging by all the antique books. Celebrity professors, maybe.

A monster boat with gold-leaf in the paint and three massive hot tubs on deck. Maybe dozen concubines, each wearing a collar of gold thread. Elves with pale blue skin and white hair. So many frost-elves in one place? Naked? Fire-elf prince or princess, no doubt.

She looks over each craft. The little touches on each reveal more about their owners than they’d like to believe.

Rack of drones? Life preservers? Human. Tech bro.

Extra-large white bathrobes on every chair? Six extra exhaust ports? Fat and obnoxious tycoon. Oil magnate.

“Bingo,” she whispers.

Green. No windows. Shaped more like a sausage than a boat. Might be submersible.

There’s an eight-man patrol by the gate. Two groups of four, never out of each other’s sight. One man below her at the door to the office building. Mid-caliber carbines and semiautomatic sidearms. Jeep with ammo boxes in the backseat.

Easy. If the guards weren’t _human._ Pip is done skipping town in the middle of the night and dead humans mean pissed off police, not Detective Connelly waving off the beat cops and asking ‘what they did’ while Pip cuts off a proof of death trophy.

At this distance, the wicked little bow Viv cooked up could put a shaft through the target’s skull and the deck below it but serial killers aren’t the types to stick their heads out.

She has to get on that boat.

The hatch on the roof squeals in protest and she hears the beeping of the silent alarm before she can think to put a silencing spell down. Does no one oil things anymore?

Pip drops into the building and into a janitor’s closet. She pulls out her casting rod and whispers a Word into it. Silvery light pours from the depths of the quartz. She looks over the row of cleaning supplies.

“Bleach, bleach, bleach,” she mutters.

“Hah.”

It’s a three-gallon jug of the stuff but beggars can’t be choosers.

“Now...acetone.”

Finding an empty plastic jug is a cinch. She goes back into the pockets of her jacket for the measuring cups. One part acetone, fifty parts bleach. 

Another whisper and the light disappears. Pip lets her eyes adjust for a few minutes until the wickeder parts of her bloodline have aligned with the pitch-black room.

She pushes the concoction into the air takeaway vent and flips open her tablet, unwinding a cable and popping it into the wall jack. Traditionalists expect an all-magic approach from a _sceleritas sidhe_ assassin. The rich and the royals, more so. What’s the point of making an assassin with a bastardized mix of elves, shifters, and vampires if they use human weapons or tools?

The network is tight, but the off-the-shelf computer plugged into the docking system isn’t. No retry limit, maximum of twelve characters. She pulls up the employee’s social media profiles, turns on the scraper and watches the list of pets, spouses, children’s names and birthdays and favorite songs populate. 

Pip points the browser at the webpage for the winch and crane controls and lets it guess. Chloroform takes thirty minutes to cook. The program has her into the system in under fifteen. They dock each yacht with mooring chains, and the winches are motorized and automated. Three clicks and using the same (stupid) password for the admin account gives her manual control of the one the water-elf’s yacht is docked to. She sets the pull weight to maximum, turns off the automatic stop and puts it on a sixteen-minute timer. She slips the tablet back in the aluminum case and tucks it under the lowest shelf.

The flyer says that the jet ski race ends at five. By four-fifty Pip has six chloroform soaked rags, ten zip ties, and three bottles of _incredibly_ flammable runoff. 

The closet door unlocks from the inside, at least.

Through the window. She can see that the guy watching the door is portly and gray-haired. Using chloroform on him is just a coin toss whether his heart gives out which is a coin toss on ten-to-forty behind bars.

The hard way it is.

Pip ducks into the break room and knocks on the inside of the front door.

“Yeah?” he asks.

She swings the door hard. A crack and a curse. Rolling out into the hallway has her under his wandering gun hand. She clenches her fingers tight on his wrist and slams it into the plate glass of the window. Once. Twice. Three times.

The gun hits the floor with a bang. A round goes wild through the window.

“Asshole!”

She slams her fist into his gut. His whimpering bulk slides onto the carpet. 

Pip slips out the door. The other guards are splitting off this direction but they’re two hundred yards away. There’s not much cover. Some rich asshole’s Jaguar. Low slung and _fragile_ if they open up but better than being a target dummy.

Unclipping the bow’s strap, Pip twists the nuts tight and slots the string into the eyelets. She plucks a short-shafted arrow from the bandolier strapped to her calf. White oak, barn owl feathers, and chipped obsidian. 

“Burn,” she whispers, pressing a kiss to the arrowhead.

She tosses a jar of runoff from her mixing on a high arc and pops up, drawing the bow back. The pulleys spin and squeak. Pip lets go and the arrow grazes off the jar before it falls.

Flame and broken glass scatter all over the canvas-covered walkway to the star-elves yacht. Two of the guards split off to put it out.

The Jaguar’s unlocked. Better yet, it has fighter-jet style controls, parking cameras and reclining seats.

Pip guns the engine and aims straight at the remaining two guards. She’s crouched behind the engine block at this angle. Bullets spray the hood. The windshield shatters.

One guy dives first, so she swings closer to the other and throws the passenger door open. It connects, and he goes skidding along the cement. The gun spins off into the harbor. 

His buddies’ rifle is still spraying the far side of the Jag. 

She has a forty-foot sprint to the guard and another twenty for the back of the yacht.

No more cheating.

Pip whispers the true name of the Bone-Raven and gathers hot air around her fist, spreading it into a cone. She stands up and holds it out. Brass and steel slide off, melted to slag. The concrete under the edge of the cone crumbles as if it went through a thousand years in seconds.

The guard’s rifle clicks. He swears and fumbles for a fresh magazine.

Pip releases the cone. A column of searing wind sails towards him. He topples onto his back, shielding his face.

With a clear path, she makes it to the unconscious guard before his partner can find his feet. A check of his gear comes up short. Only two flashbangs.

Smoke grenades, though. Which is odd for private security for a glorified boat dock but it’ll do. She tosses them one after the other, forming a half-circle of black smoke around this end of the dock.

The climbing hook punches through the windows of the yacht with ease. Once she’s climbed up it, she leaves the contraption coiled on the deck. The jar in her coat pocket is vibrating. The curse on the bottle says the target is close and death magic just isn’t wrong. Death is reliable like that.

Whoever owns this yacht, he’s the right guy.

The upper deck is quiet.

The lower deck has servants quarters, turned into storage. Fits. He wouldn’t want someone to see his private stack of bodies.

As she steps onto the stairs going up, a shriek of rage sounds out, followed by four gunshots. One clips her thigh on a ricochet. She bites down, feeling her fangs slice into her gums. A trickle of blood runs down her throat, making her brain sizzle.

She throws a flashbang up past the opened door, then follows it up with the other.

When she gets up the stairs, he’s writhing on the ground, cupping his ears.

Pip slings her bow out, nocks one of the soft-tip arrows and pulls back.

The steel tip punches through his skull. The aluminum shaft behind it pushes forward while the glass of the barbs shatters between them. Shards of glass bounce around his gray matter and the rest of the shaft comes out the back, nailing him down.

She fishes out his wallet. ID says his name was Aranus. 

A gurgle from the next room catches her attention. There’s a girl, maybe twenty, bleeding out on the bed with twists and twirls cut into her naked skin. Her throat was slit, missing the artery and the windpipe but catching the vein.

Pip rushes over and clamps her fingers around the wound. She’s squeezing far too hard but a crushed voice box and a bruised throat beat dying. There’s an aquarium of fish above the bed. She reaches out into the fish and kills them, one by one, transferring life into the girl -- human, of course -- even as her own blood loss gets the better of her.

“Come on, kid. Come on.”

The door at the other end of the ship is kicked open.

“Police!”

“Goddamned time,” Pip snarls.

“She’s hurt!” she calls back.

“Hands on your head!”

It’s two beat cops. They train their guns on her the instant they see her. One of them -- the decent human being -- calls for medical help. The other just stands there, lip twitching. Vein on his forehead pulsing.

“I put my hands up, she bleeds out,” Pip reminds him. “I’ll hold still. My hands are busy. You can disarm me while we wait for the paramedics.”

\-----

These are not high-quality handcuffs. Not only are they pinchy, they’re cheap enough that she wouldn’t need to use her full strength to snap them. Handcuffs that aren’t pink and padded and clipped to the headboard or don’t come with a smirking, naked strigoi stalking towards her defeat the purpose.

Connelly beats her usual time. Under twenty minutes. She bends down next to Aranus’ still-leaking skull. The judge’s mark has formed on the skin, big and black and carrying the sigils of the authorities who placed the hit.

“Solar _and_ Lunar Throne,” Connelly mutters. “Seeker’s Guild. Choir of Covens. Smoking King. That’s death warrants from five groups. Jesus! Who didn’t this guy piss off?”

“Detective!” Pip calls out, wiggling her fingers. “We gotta stop meeting like this, gorgeous.”

Connelly doesn’t look at the corner they have her tied up in.

“For the thousandth time, Pip. I’m _married.”_

The detective sighs.

“Internal magical community business, boys. Unlock the cuffs and let the killer nympho elf go. Any gear that looks _fancy_ is hers. Any gear that looks like it’s about to pop is not.”

“Yeah, you’ll want to just throw the chloroform overboard. Fumes are stronger than I thought.”

“WHAT?”

Pip shrugs.

“Better living through chemistry.”


	2. II

Mandy knows she doesn’t belong here. Her neighborhood thinks a three-generation single-family house is exotic.

This is a neighborhood where every other business is a nightclub, pickup spot, or dive bar. Velvet ropes and would-be sugar babies flocking around VIP entrances, mewling and pleading with the bouncers. Fidgeting in impractical dresses. Trying to be the one the guys choose to ‘bend the rules’ for this time. Muscular, bored men select partners for richer, scrawnier, desperate specimens. A perverse twist on Darwin.

She could reach out with her left hand and pluck a flower from the dryad’s cart, dusted with some enchanted and no doubt psychedelic glitter.

She could reach out with her right and take a skewer of sizzling, spicy, _not local_ meat from a vendor who has her horns bagged in two separate hair nets and who is fanning the grill with her wings to drive the mouth-watering scent into the street.

Walk ten feet and go left, and she can slip into a BDSM den.

Ten feet further and take a right, and it’s an elven smokehouse.

Next building down, a gay bar.

Across the street, what must be a demon strip club or something. _Glassfolk,_ she reminds herself. These folks are doing her a favor. Her mother taught her better than to call someone a name they don’t like.

Her oncologist was honest like she’d asked. She has the unsexiest of cancers: glioblastoma multiforme of the frontal lobes of the brain. No pink-clad power walkers. No humorous 'save the boobies’ fund drives.

Five percent chance of survival, and even then, surgery and chemo might cost her mind, her identity, maybe even the ability to speak. It was dear Seth who suggested it. Said he’d rather be the widower of the woman he loved than watch her suffer so much. She decided on the spot. Make sure her lawyer was ready to fight the life insurance. Sell her car. An entire year of ninety hour weeks. Every pet project for her bosses. Every bonus. Mandy did everything in her power to make sure they paid the house off. Her daughter’s college fund was stuffed to the brim. Everything.

That only left choosing how to die. This all started with a headache that lasted too long. The doctor reminded her he couldn’t help her kill herself. Then he gave Mandy a slip of paper.

A sleek young man in a three-piece suit visited her home two days later with a contract handwritten with a fountain pen. She signed the contract.

They gave her a slip of paper.

It just said: **_the Throb - tattoos and red hair._ **

No address. No clues. Maybe so the police have no breadcrumb trail. Hence her stumble through the nightclub district.

The average bouncer on the street must weigh three hundred pounds. 

That’s the average as long as she _excludes_ the young woman watching a building clad in black slate with a faint, rhythmic pulse of red light coming from within. 

That bouncer doesn’t top a hundred twenty pounds. She has skin pale as milk, long, skinny fingers, and long black hair braided into a thick cord that tickles her back pockets. She’s shaped like the gold-diggers, nubile and slim. The stillness of her, the plainness of her haircut, and the rigid tension in her posture separate the two species.

She has no earpiece and no taser. Just a gentleman’s cane. Lacquered hardwood with a silver cap. 

A few college-age guys. Already totally smashed. Two stumble up to her. She cocks her eyebrow and waits for some explanation. Two of them take her silence for permission and push past her. Two man-children land hard on their ass. The bouncer’s cane is now perfectly perpendicular to the sidewalk. Both boys are rubbing their chests where it slapped them.

Mandy swallows. Hard.

If that’s not a vamp bouncer, she’s in for a long night of wandering.

She holds up the paper the doctor gave her. The bouncer crooks a finger with her free hand. Mandy holds the paper in front of her chest. Like it can somehow protect her.

“Merciful night,” the bouncer murmurs. “Poor thing.”

Mandy shivers. She’s had enough of their fucking pity.

The bouncer whips out her cell phone.

“Boss lady? Got a woman out here with brain cancer. She’s got signed papers for mercy. Want me to send her in?”

Mandy’s cheeks are on fire.

People behind her had been grousing and complaining. Whispers spreading back from the front quiet them.

The bouncer smiles and nods. “Sure thing, boss.”

“Go on in, lady.”

She unclips the rope and waves her cane towards the entryway.

Throb is nothing like Mandy expected. It doesn’t look much like a nightclub, even though she has little experience with such things. Walls lined with paintings, arranged behind pristine glass. Antique couches and not-quite-matched hardwood tables make up the dining area. A few old-fashioned fainting couches, of all things. Moans and gasps waft out of curtained-off areas to the side. The dance floor is slate, not hardwood.

Candles on every table and a candle-filled chandelier light the room with a buttery shine. Three servers work the entire space, and they’re acing it if the laughter and animated conversations are any clues. Star-elves with ink-black skin dotted with glowing pinpricks and dimly glowing red and blue splotches and orange like spilled ink.

A statuesque glassfolk leads her positively hulking lady friend through the crowd. Sisters, perhaps? They share the same matte gray skin, the shade of campfire ash. The same polished, up-swept tangles of horns. Like a sheep’s horns, but pointing up. Each has a playmate under their arm, and their arms around each other hang at the hip and dig in, groping. So they’re not brother and sister. Something else. Something stranger. Six spade-like tips sneak around the necks and chests of the humans, like three big fingers. 

Viv is at the bar. Unmistakable. Her coppery hair hangs in a long French braid, tickling the bottom of the cutout of her dress.

She turns to Mandy and crooks a finger.

The first thing that catches the eye is the tattoos. Botticelli’s rendition of Venus decorates her back, rising on the clamshell without her retainers but equally milky and radiant in a tattoo as it was oil on canvas. Titian’s take on the goddess reclines along the bicep of her right arm, plumper bellied and more scandalous, hand trailing between her own legs. Botticelli’s Three Graces dance around her neck like a collar.

“Not what I was expecting,” Mandy jokes. “Not with ‘look for tattoos’ on the note.”

Viv’s plucked ginger eyebrow rises.

“I mean, it’s...never mind.”

Viv smiles. Her hands have never stopped tickling the wrist of the tanned woman beside her. The actual meal of the night, perhaps. After Mandy is a foul, cancer-soured appetizer.

Her complexion is not natural. Not close. Not only too pale, too grey. Without the gold blush, the dusting of glittery crimson lip gloss, and the blue eyeshadow, the _wrongness_ of a pretty woman with silver-ish skin laced with sapphire veins would probably send Mandy away screaming.

Mandy sighs.

“Can you make it not hurt?”

Viv nods and offers her hand. The girl on the other seat whines -- much like a hungry dog -- and Viv presses a kiss to her hairline.

“Back soon, little one. We shall do such wicked and delicious things, I promise you.”

Out in the alley, the monster shows.

Under starlight, Viv’s skin is like sterling silver. No passing it off as human. Her eyes sizzle, shifting from blue to a sizzling shade, like molten gold as her fangs slide out. Fangs that shine polished porcelain and prick into her lower lips.

An idol of silver, sapphire, ruby with eyes like gold rings. Wrought in the likeness of death.

A fist grabs tight to Mandy’s hair, and powerful limbs tilt her head back.

“Fast?” Viv rasps, licking her lips. “Or slow?”

“Slow,” Mandy moans. “At the wrist, please.”

She blushes.

“Open casket.”

Viv lifts Mandy’s hand to her lips.

“Anything, gorgeous. Anything for you.”

Viv slices the wrist veins open with a claw and seals her lips around the wound before so much as a drop stains her dress.

Mandy drifts away.

\-----

Viv settles back into her chaise, trailing her fingers towards the ice bucket. She reaches for her phone and taps out a quick text to her fixer. Mandy's body will be back in her marriage bed by dawn, washed and coiffed. The husband can take it from there.

The tanned girl from before -- Caity, was it? -- sweet-talked her way up to the VIP balcony. She’s kneeling on a velvet throw pillow.

She has a burgundy handkerchief held up in her palms, like an offering to the gods. Viv snatches it and dabs at the blood on her lips.

“So patient,” Viv coos, dragging her hands along Caity’s scalp. For a moment, she forgot that her claws don’t fade as fast as they did when she was younger. Each is like a two-inch hook of jagged steel. 

What she meant as a tickle leaves four deep gouges on the scalp. Caity gasps and shivers, but she does not scream.

At one end, the gouges seal before Viv lifts her fingers, leaving only the blood matting her hair. 

Two things can heal like that. A purebred shifter of a powerful line and another strigoi vampire.

“Not so simple, are you?” Viv snarls.

“No,” Caity sniffles.

“Explain yourself. I can smell you’re still young. Still soft. What? One century? Two?”

“Sixty years,” Caity admits. “You could kill me as easily as anyone down there. Wouldn’t even see you move.”

Viv pops the cork on the champagne. She pours two flutes and offers one to Caity.

“Convince me not to, then.”

“What?”

Viv chuckles.

“You didn’t end up in my den for no reason, you soft-fanged child. Explain how you came to be in my club. My _territory._ Explain how an unaffiliated strigoi with no scent, no coven, and thus no _friends_ came to be here.”

Rather than answering aloud, Caity tips her head back and opens her mouth.

Viv groans.

“You want me to bind you? Use your words.”

“Yes.”

Viv snaps her fingers and points at a hovering waiter. Not the best of her sun-dogs, but Charles is polite, cultured, and capable of plowing through a ridiculous number of errands. He can do more before noon than most professional assistants do in two days.

“Towels, Charles. And the chains Pip left.”

“Yes, milady.”

Viv clamps one hand around the back of Caity’s neck and squeezes hard. Human bones would be dust by now. Caity’s neck must ache, but it’s not _breaking._ Yet.

“Very well. You’ll be chained until I know why you _really_ came.”

Viv lifts her wrist to her fangs and rips it open, holding the gurgling, pumping veins over Caity’s upturned mouth. Blood runs in thick, dark streams onto her tongue, over her lips, and down onto her top.

She traces a rune on her hand in champagne, and the skin knits.

Caity collapses, toes curling and hips jumping.

Viv’s cell phone rings. The ringtone is a falcon’s cry, and half of the dance floor looks up. The contact photo is a smiling, topless elf with salt-pale skin and long fingers, beckoning the photographer towards her.

“Pip. I missed you. How was your day?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to experience this district as Mandy did while seeking out Viv. We'll get a more Viv-centric chapter later.  
> \-----  
> Caity is a weird little strigoi...approaching a stranger who's not only a stranger, she's a noble fifty times her own age. With a flimsy excuse. Up to no good.


End file.
